Butcher's Crossing

Novel · 296 pages · Paperback · 2007 · NYRB Classics

No company required

A buffalo hunt out of Kansas into the Colorado mountains, 1873. Will Andrews is twenty-three, gone from Harvard in his third year, and rich by accident. He has left Boston with his share of an uncle's bequest. That is the whole of his qualification for what follows. He spends it on a hunter called Miller, who claims to know a valley holding a herd nobody has touched.

John Williams opens Butcher's Crossing on that single, unqualified transaction. Andrews wants to see nature properly, the way his father's Unitarianism and three years at Harvard taught him to want it. He gets to see a great deal of it.

By the second month in the valley the four men have become a machine, and not one of them chose it. Work backwards from that. Miller shoots from a stand, circling the animals so they will not scatter. Andrews carries rifles up and cools barrels. Schneider skins. Hoge cooks and minds the wagon. By the end of the first week, instruction has largely given way to routine. Schneider is the only man hired for pay; the others are on shares of a return that never arrives. No company stands behind any of it: Andrews's bequest bought the outfit, Miller's fixation supplies the discipline. Industrial slaughter turns out to need no industry at all. Four men and one fixed idea will do it.

Williams gives this system its force through physical detail: the thirst of the journey, Andrews watching blood run from his injury, rifles growing hot from repeated firing and hides cut from carcasses. Each description removes another layer from Andrews’s abstract idea of nature. The wilderness reaches him through bodily pain, then becomes dead matter processed by labour. What he sought as revelation appears instead as a procedure that consumes the herd and wears down the men carrying it out.

Snow closes the pass before the wagon can get out. Hoge's Bible, read aloud from and then not read from. Hides frozen into stacks nobody can shift. Tallow, gut, a smell that stops being mentioned. Miller checking the ridge each morning with the patience of a man who has decided waiting is work. Schneider saying the date aloud until nobody answers. The hunt has stopped producing anything, and the men go on being organised by its hours, its waste, its damage.

The narrative approach is constant throughout; only the object of attention moves. Andrews arrives wanting something he has no words for, and the early chapters stay vague because Williams declines to lend him any. During the killing the account turns exact and stops explaining: rifle, shot, fall, reload. He sees materially now, and less romantically. Precision arrives at the moment meaning leaves.

Then Francine, and the argument bends. She is drawn only as far as Andrews can perceive her, and that defence fails: the same restriction produces Miller and Hoge intact. Perception is the novel's method, so the one character who exists purely as its object is where the method turns on itself. Francine carries the collapse of Andrews's romanticism and is denied any life outside it, and Williams gives no sign of having noticed. She is underwritten, and the failure sits inside a method that works everywhere else.

Now the bill. The animals become hides, thousands still stacked in the valley when the thaw lets the men out. Only a wagonload travels with them. It is gone within minutes at the river: the lashings break, the load scatters into the current, and Schneider goes under with it when a log strikes his horse and a hind hoof catches him high on the head. They reach Butcher's Crossing knowing only that more than three thousand prime hides are cached in Colorado. The market has collapsed while they were snowed in. Skins worth four dollars each under McDonald's agreement are now worth ten cents. Hoge pays with his mind. Andrews loses every reason he arrived with. Miller sets fire to McDonald's shack and pushes the surrounding bales into the flames. The product never becomes money. It stops between hide and commodity.

Stoner is the better novel. It follows a man who accepts a narrowed life and finds something in it worth having, and holds its people steadily enough that the narrowing registers as loss. Francine is where Butcher's Crossing falls short of that. What it will not do, and Stoner does, is leave its man an explanation. It gives a boy exactly what he asked for and shows what the work makes of him: skill, endurance, knowledge of how to kill and survive a winter, none of it supplying the meaning he came for. He rides out after dawn without knowing where he is going. Williams has stripped away the unalterable self Andrews came west to find, leaving him acutely conscious instead of what is immediately under his hands: reins, saddle, horse, air. Emptied is the word these pages earn, and emptiness of that kind can be read as freedom. The harder book was always this one.